Talent and Research Culture

On Friday 17 November 2023 the non-profit board of OpenAI announced that Sam Altman was no longer its chief executive. He "was not consistently candid in his communications with the board, hindering its ability to exercise its responsibilities," the board said, and it named Mira Murati, the chief technology officer, as interim chief executive. Greg Brockman, the chair, resigned hours later. The six-member board included three independent directors, Adam D'Angelo, Helen Toner and Tasha McCauley, and the chief scientist, Ilya Sutskever. Its duty was to the mission, not to investors. Microsoft, which had committed about $13 billion to OpenAI and built Bing, GitHub Copilot and Microsoft 365 Copilot on its models, was told about a minute before the announcement (reported). It had no vote.

Over the weekend investors, including Thrive, Khosla and Sequoia, and Microsoft pressed for Altman's return. Talks failed, and on Sunday the board named Emmett Shear, the former chief executive of Twitch, as interim chief executive. Early on Monday 20 November Satya Nadella announced that Altman and Brockman would lead a new advanced-AI group at Microsoft and that OpenAI's staff were welcome to join them. About 700 of OpenAI's ~770 employees signed a letter saying they would follow Altman unless the board resigned (reported; counts range up to ~745). On the night of 21 November OpenAI announced an agreement in principle for Altman to return, with an initial board of Bret Taylor as chair, Larry Summers and D'Angelo. Sutskever, Toner and McCauley left the board.

A review by the law firm WilmerHale, summarised on 8 March 2024, found that the old board had acted within its discretion but that Altman's conduct "did not mandate removal", and Altman rejoined the board. The board had held the legal power to fire him; the people the company ran on, and the cloud partner that could hire them all, held the practical power.